Canadian environmental history is a burgeoning sub-field of Canadian history, but it is not very well known outside of academia. This is my own research speciality. On many occasions, I have had to answer the question: what is environmental history? Periodically, this is a question that environmental historians ask themselves. […]
Environmental History
173 posts
Episode 45: The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, 29 October 2014 [56:00] Download Audio It cuts through the centre of the continent linking all of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Long the ambition of governments, industry, and continentalist visionaries, the St. Lawrence Seaway fulfilled the mid-century modernist dream of […]
Episode 44: The Second World Congress for Environmental History, 24 September 2014 [48:01] Download Audio For five days this past July, environmental historians from around the world convened in Guimarães, Portugal for the Second World Congress for Environmental History. This is the main event for the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations. […]
For most of its history, ecology has not been a guiding principle for the management of Stanley Park. This is one of the observations that I made in my book Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History. Throughout the twentieth century, Park Board officials and Vancouver residents struggled over how to manage the […]
Next week, I will be participating on a roundtable at the Second World Congress of Environmental History in Guimarães, Portugal. Our roundtable is titled, “Beyond Texts and Archives: Experiments with New Sources and Methods in Environmental History” and it is scheduled for Tuesday, July 8, 2014 from 14:00-15:30 in CO-04 (CFPG). All the […]
Episode 43: Environmental Scholarship and Environmental Advocacy, 2 July 2014 [47:04] Download Audio Environmental history has been both friend and foe to environmentalism. Historians can provide important context for understanding contemporary environmental issues, but they can also offer a critique of environmentalism that could undermine the political and social goals of activists. […]
Better late than never, here are our picks for what was worth reading on the #envhist tag for the month of May 2014. We track this tag every month and try to pick out some of the more interesting articles, videos, and audio that Twitter users shared. 1. Backstory with […]
I am very happy to share the news that Inventing Stanley Park won the 2014 Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for outstanding contribution to British Columbia history. Obviously, this is a tremendous honour and I am grateful to the prize committee and the rest of my colleagues in the CHA. This was […]
If you missed last week’s Canadian History and Environment Summer School at York University, you can live the whole thing over again on Twitter. I have compiled an archive of all of the #CHESS2014 Tweets that captures almost every moment of the event. You will find comments, questions, photos, and […]
It has been another full month of activity online in the environmental history community. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the flurry of great work out there. To help you manage the flood of content, we keep track of the #envhist tag on Twitter for items of […]
This week, I am taking advantage of some of the historical research materials available at the National Energy Board library in Calgary, Alberta. As we discussed on a recent episode of Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, federal department libraries are incredible resources for environmental history. With the closure and consolidation […]
Episode 42: The Right to a Healthy Environment, 17 March 2014Â [34:41] Download Audio Canadians value their natural environment. Nine out of ten worry about the impacts of environmental degradation on their health. Nine out of ten are concerned about climate change. Eight out of ten believe that Canada needs stricter […]